Posted on 11/03/2023 4:45:39 AM PDT by MtnClimber
Academia’s narrative about “land appropriation” and “cultural genocide” is not only dubious factually—it also offers a justification for revenge against certain groups.
The newest chapter in grievance politics is being written in American schools. This emerging narrative of “land appropriation” and “cultural genocide” is one-sided, divisive, and contrary both to history and to widely accepted ethical and constitutional principles of individual accountability and due process.
On our campus, the University of Chicago Civic Knowledge Project (UCCKP), together with the American Indian Center, has proposed a land acknowledgment to “demonstrate[] a commitment to beginning the process of dismantling the ongoing legacies of settler colonialism and genocide.” UCCKP recognizes that this and other “social justice” processes “will probably take nothing less than the democratic socialist transformation of the U.S.”
In grade schools throughout the United States, teachers are beginning to assert that the majority of U.S. land was “stolen” from Native Americans. Non-indigenous landowners living in those areas today must pay reparations or return the land to the descendants of inhabitants who predated the arrival of “white people.” Teachers present these assertions as irrefutable; students are expected to absorb this narrative, perhaps “uncomfortably,” but without questioning.
In fact, the U.S. is an outlier among nations in that much of its land transfers to settlers and the government were negotiated and paid for. Take the experience of one of our families: George Abbot and others purchased the town of Andover from the Sagamore of Massachusetts in 1643. Two of Abbot’s sons later succumbed to an Indian attack while working the family’s land during King Philip’s War (1676), with one killed and the other taken captive. Of course, wars include atrocities on both sides, but the campus narrative of stolen land and oppressed, innocent natives is far from the truth.
In the area known today as Chicago, the first frontier settlers felt too vulnerable and decided to march back east in 1812. The Potawatomi ambushed them less than two miles from their original point of departure, Fort Dearborn, making a point of isolating the children and then tomahawking them to death. Most of the other settlers were killed, too; in one particularly gruesome episode, William Wells had his heart cut out and feasted on by the warriors. This event motivated the United States to negotiate the Treaty of Chicago with the local tribes, receiving Chicago-area land in exchange for money and western territory.
Land acknowledgments leave these “complexities” in the histories of Andover, Chicago, and elsewhere unspecified. The point of the exercise seems to be to desensitize youth to radical, revisionist, and revanchist claims, so that violence against latter-day civilian populations someday will seem like justified revenge. Consider, for example, the full-throated support for Hamas’s massacre of Israelis that we have seen recently from so many academics arguing for “decolonization.”...
I wonder how the left would feel if school children were taught that there needs to be revenge for the citizens killed by their own communist governments?
BTTT
Never let your children close to anyone that has an Ed degree. Teachers are the most destructive elements in our society. We need to forcibly confiscate all their previous earnings and pensions as reparations for the damage they have done. See, two can play this game and most faggoty teachers are not armed.
UCCKP. Says it all.
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“In grade schools throughout the United States, teachers are beginning to assert that the majority of U.S. land was “stolen” from Native Americans.“
I believe the word they are looking for is “conquered”. Most have done it at some point.
PS: we aren’t giving it back
If Indians and their terrorist allies attempt to take disputed lands, we could take their casinos. That would give them something to complain about.
If they claim to be native American, send them back to Russia at the edge of the Bering Strait.
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